Artifical intelliegence will surpass human intelligence after 2020, predicts Vernor Vinge, 62, a pioneer in AI, who in a recent interview warned about the risks and opportunities that an electronic super-intelligence would offer to mankind.

Now, Fujitsu Laboratories has announced it will participate in Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII) AI project, ”Can a Robot Pass the University of Tokyo (Todai) Entrance Exam?” (“Todai Robot”), led by NII professor Noriko Arai. The goal of the project: enable an AI program to score high marks on Todai’s math entrance exam for admission by 2016, and meet all admission requirements for Todai by 2021.

The test uses high-school math problems. For a computer to solve a math problem, it needs three things, according to NII:

Semantic analysis: Understand the problem text, which is expressed as natural language and formulas easily understood by humans.

Formulation: Convert to a form that can be processed by a computer.*
Calculation: Find the answer using the mathematical solver.

Vernor Vinge is a retired professor of mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author who is well-known for his 1993 manifesto, "The Coming Technological Singularity, in which he argues that exponential growth in technology means a point will be reached where the consequences are unknown. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels A Fire Upon the Deep, in which he envisions a galaxy that is divided up into 'zones of thought', in which the further one moves from the center of the galaxy, the higher the level of technology one can achieve.

In May 1997, IBM's Deep Blue won the chess tournament against Gary Kasparov. Was that the first glimpse of a new kind of intelligence? " It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future," Vinge continued, create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event — such a singularity — are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm."